Booster Pets

Inexpensive Dopamine. Booster Pets is a game designed to make your brain happy with a Companion. We took the most addictive parts about opening booster packs, and discarded the worse parts: money.

Comment

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the excitement and dopamine rush we get whenever we open a booster pack (like Pokemon cards) hoping we would finally get something rare. The anticipation is what makes it so addictive and satisfying. Plus, getting a pet is expensive and it get's lonely at times :( We wanted to recreate those feelings, without burning a hole in your wallet, and providing you an animal companion!

What it does

Booster Pets is a playful mobile game that lets users open digital booster packs to collect virtual pets of different rarities. Instead of paying to open packs, players perform simple real-world actions such as:

  • Shaking their phone
  • Waving their phone
  • Blowing into the microphone
  • Smiling into the camera Each action triggers a pack-opening animation, that reveals the virtual pet cards. The pets vary in rarity and visual effects, mimicking the thrill of opening real booster packs.

How we built it

We built Booster Pets using React Native to handle the app’s UI and core logic. The Expo framework was also used to simplify the usage of native modules. We integrated device sensor APIs (such as motion, microphone and camera input) to detect physical actions like shaking, waving, blowing and smiling. These inputs are mapped directly to the pack-opening mechanics, making the experience more interactive.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was calibrating the sensors with thresholds that felt just right. Thresholds that were off by just a little threw off the sensors significantly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to capture, to some extent, the addictive booster pack opening experience through animations and effects to make the pack opening experience as immersive as possible, and we hope everyone tries this app out!

What we learned

Through this project, we learned:

  • How to work with mobile sensor APIs and handle noisy real-world input
  • The importance of UX tuning in interaction-based applications
  • How small design choices (animations, delays, reveals) can significantly affect emotional engagement

What's next for Booster Pets

We hope to create more sprites and customisations such as vanity collectibles, and more interactions like adding friends! We hope to also add animations and greater details to the card style and sprites.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates